Dumped RAID5 for WHS

Pandobear

Pandobear

Pandobear

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I have finally decided to move completely over to WHS from RAID 5. I have had a Windows home server system based on ten 750 GB drives with all my DVD rips etc on, but also had this backed up on a Server 2008 software RAID 5 array, which had 12 750GB drives. For media serving I found the Home server with it's Drive extender far quicker, likely because it only has to spin up one drive to serve the data, whilst the 2008 machine had to spin up twelve drives. Whilst benchmarks show that the Home server maxs out at around 75Mb/sec, this is plenty fast enough for multiple data streams without any problems at all.

I am also much happier with WHS storage system that allows duplication on important data, rather than single drive redundancy that is offered by RAID 5. I have installed a second WHS in Hyper-V that now deals with all the backup storage.

I really believe that the days of the hardware RAID cards is coming to an end, it just does not make sense to spend £400 + on a raid card when you can have 4 TB of HDD storage for the same money, and either 'mirror' your data( RAID 1 or 10 if you need the speed) or use WHS or similar.
 
You cannot beat the availability and uptime for a Hardware Raid'ed System drive on Business Critical Systems. Even the old poxy windows software raid was a balls-ache to get back and working. When uptime is the be all and end all, then hardware raid will be around for a very long time.
 
WHS still introduces corruption if it gets worked hard, I don't see it as a comparable solution to a hardware RAID controller. Also, spinning up and down drives isn't good for them, better to keep them spun up all the time.
If you don't want to spend money on a hardware card (not that a Dell PERC costs much) then for Linux there is mdadm which is very capable, or better still ZFS and RAID-Z under Solaris which has none of the flaws of regular RAID and is extremely robust.

The key advantage of RAID5/6 is that all your data is protected, to achieve the same with mirroring.duplication you have to have twice the number of drives which ends up costing more than a RAID card and you need a bigger enclosure and more SATA ports.
 
I agree that for business critical systems that then hardware raid, with hot swappable drives is likely to remain. But for home use I don't think that it is a pratical solution.

The key advantage of RAID5/6 is that all your data is protected,
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This is not the case, the key advantage is that you have speed, and an amount of redundancy. So for my RAID5 array I had 1/12th redundancy, if one drive failed then my data was still available, two failed, all gone. Not the greatest insurance policy ever.

Of course I should have my data backed up somewhere else, I have read this over and over on posts when arrays have crashed and people are inquiring about retrieving their data. My point is that if you accept that you are going ot back up your data anyway, what is the point of RAID5 or 6? All they do is allow your data to be available whilst you have one or two drive failures. As DustyMiller says, this is important in a Critical system, however most home users who see a hard drive failure in their array will shut the system down immeadiately, so again, why RAID 5 or 6?

With Home Server if I select duplication it mirrors my data across another spindle. This also scores over RAID1 in that it does not necessarily use the same second drive all of the time, so in the same scenario where I lose one drive, at most I could potentially lose 1/12th of my data, if I have duplication turned on, I should lose no data. If I lose two drives then it follows that the most I could lose with duplication is 1/12th, however, it is likely to be less than this (may be no data at all) due to data being duplicated across multiple drives.

My only point is that for home use, RAID is not a perfect solution. How many home users that have RAID 5 have a 'hot spare' ready to deploy? Not too many I would suspect. For me, Home Server is a better solution, following many years of RAID 5.

I agree that there are other systems, ZFS looks very interesting, but I would have a lot of research to deploy Solaris on my system, though apparently it will be implemented on the Mac soon?
 
Im very interested in this thread as im going to be building my NAS system soon. Im going to be starting off with 8 Drives, increasing to 21 later. I had thought about using Openfiler and software RAID5 (Or possibly RAID1 across all drives for ultimate paranoia), but im now also considering other options such as Samba and Windows home server. How are you finding home server so far? When you duplicate some data, do you know which drive it has been duplicated to? Also does the storage pool simply appear as a single drive to the client computers?
 
I find Windows home server very stable, and works well on low end/older components. I currently have mine running on a Fujitsu Econel server which is a daul core 3GHz Pentium 4 with a Rocket raid 1742 card, a Silicon image 3132 card and a 1 to 5 port multiplier esata box. It works particularly well with the port multiplier because it is only writing to one disk at a time, unlike RAID0 or 5 that would be writing to multiple drives at the same time.

WHS does present one shared drive pool which appears to be a single drive to the client computer, this pool is expandable and reduceable, meaning you can add or remove drives at anytime.

The duplicated data is taken care off by the OS, though you can get an 'add-in' that shows the duplication locations, though I don't believe you can do more than view it.

The other final benefit is that the data is stored on each individual drive in NTFS format, so you can remove a drive and view it's contents on any XP or Vista machine, useful in the event of a complete disaster!

I much prefer the storage solution offered by WHS, which is why I have moved my main server to running a virtual WHS for it's storage, over RAID5, hence this thread.
 
AbsenceJam said:
WHS still introduces corruption if it gets worked hard, I don't see it as a comparable solution to a hardware RAID controller. Also, spinning up and down drives isn't good for them, better to keep them spun up all the time.
If you don't want to spend money on a hardware card (not that a Dell PERC costs much) then for Linux there is mdadm which is very capable, or better still ZFS and RAID-Z under Solaris which has none of the flaws of regular RAID and is extremely robust.

The key advantage of RAID5/6 is that all your data is protected, to achieve the same with mirroring.duplication you have to have twice the number of drives which ends up costing more than a RAID card and you need a bigger enclosure and more SATA ports.
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exactly, WHS is not a viable replacement for Raid 5/6 in my opinion either....it has a market for certain ppl but at £100 for a Perc 5/i hardware card it's the price of a single TB drive and a home server doesn't need anything fancier than a Perc ....300-350 MB/s hardware based raid 5 isn't fast enough? :)
 
Ah, Marscay, still 'selling' the Perc 5/i ? I am still selling WHS.

I agree that if you need 300 MB/s + then you must use a RAID solution, there is currently no way around that . However why not use RAID 0 ? The answer is that your data is unprotected, however I would argue that your data is not particularly well protected with RAID 5 either, hence the availability of RAID 6. But what do these systems actually achieve? the loss of a single drive will not effect data access, your uptime is not effected, you can hotswap out the drive and keep going. Raid 6 gives you the ability to lose two drives and keep going, hotswap out, no rebooting. All this is very useful in a production enviroment where 'uptime' is critical.

WHS is not a viable replacement for Raid 5/6 in my opinion either
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Absolutely agree, however what I disagree is that RAID 5/6 is suitable for home server use. Would you trust 6 TB of movie rips to a single RAID5/6 array? That would be a minimum of 8 1TB drives in a single array. A whole lot of work to lose should you lose a couple of drives, or the card falls over. Next problem is that I now rip 2 TB more, where you gonna put it? Not too easy to expand an array, and a long time to sit holding your breath whilst it goes on, and that is assuming that you have an ports left.

My only point is that for a cheap expandable low speed storage solution it is difficult to beat WHS, which is probably what it was designed to achieve.

I'm with you on the Perc 5/i being a great card, but of course it really was undervalued on the bay, and now people are starting to see it for what it is capable of the prices are rising rapidly, from around £60 ish when you got yours to over £100 now, if you can find one.

Horses for courses is all I am saying....
 
After reading about WHS all evening, im pretty sold on the idea. But unfortunately I have come across 2 stumbling blocks; Minimum 65Gb hardrive and minimum 512Mb ram. The hardrive I can understand as its used as a cache for file transfers, but I wanted to install it on and old 10Gb drive. But is there any way to get around the ram requirement as the machine im going to be using only has 256mb ram. :(

Also are there any reliability issues with WHS? Ive come across quite a few comments suggesting that there are reliability and corruption issues. Or have these been ironed out?
 
Messiah Khan said:
After reading about WHS all evening, im pretty sold on the idea. But unfortunately I have come across 2 stumbling blocks; Minimum 65Gb hardrive and minimum 512Mb ram. The hardrive I can understand as its used as a cache for file transfers, but I wanted to install it on and old 10Gb drive. But is there any way to get around the ram requirement as the machine im going to be using only has 256mb ram. :(

Also are there any reliability issues with WHS? Ive come across quite a few comments suggesting that there are reliability and corruption issues. Or have these been ironed out?
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Is there no way you can add another 256 meg into your machine. I think it really needs half a gig to keep it running in my opinion. I have 2 gig in mine and it runs very sweetly.
 
Yes, Power PAck 1 ironed out the corruption issue, however even whilst is existed it only happened in a rare collection of events.

In respect of the harddrive size, it uses 20Gb of your storage space, you don't install it on a seperate drive, but rather it creates a 20 Gb partition, and the rest of the drive is used for storage. Your old 10 GB drive would give you no storage space, so there would be little point in using it. Regarding the RAM issue, I am not sure you can get around it, I think the install will halt as soon as it detects too little RAM.

Why not try it on Virtual PC?, you can a free 120 day trial from Microsoft and then install it virtually.
 
I haven't used WHS post-Power Pack but I had corruption unrelated to the infamous bug before that so I'm not really inclined to try it again.
There are OSS alternatives to WHS which I'd much prefer myself. Or if you're using Windows you can just grab FlexRAID which works at directory level so you can have your separate disks but still create parity.
 
Pandobear said:
Yes, Power PAck 1 ironed out the corruption issue, however even whilst is existed it only happened in a rare collection of events.

In respect of the harddrive size, it uses 20Gb of your storage space, you don't install it on a seperate drive, but rather it creates a 20 Gb partition, and the rest of the drive is used for storage. Your old 10 GB drive would give you no storage space, so there would be little point in using it. Regarding the RAM issue, I am not sure you can get around it, I think the install will halt as soon as it detects too little RAM.

Why not try it on Virtual PC?, you can a free 120 day trial from Microsoft and then install it virtually.
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Ive now ordered a 160Gb WD to install it on. Once it's installed i'll add the other 8 500Gb WD drives. Going to try and scrape another 256mb ram from somewhere. Think its pc133 though.
 
Ive now ordered a 160Gb WD to install it on. Once it's installed i'll add the other 8 500Gb WD drives. Going to try and scrape another 256mb ram from somewhere. Think its pc133 though.
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You would be wiser to install it on one of the 500GB drives that you intend to use for storage. WHS works by saving all your data to the second partiion on your OS drive, and then moving the data to your storage drives when it has time, replacing it with a 'tomestone' file. There is a possibility that you will temporarily run out of space when copying large amounts of files to your server, by having too small a main drive, meaning that you then have to wait for the files to be moved across. Microsoft thus recommend that you use the largest drive available to you for you OS.
 
Any manager worth their salt has a hot spair in a raid 5 system and if they dont it was either stolen or they need sacking...
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Quite correct, where a manager is employed to manage an array. However in the home enviroment how many people do you think have a 'hot spare', how many even have a spare drive on the shelf to replace a defective drive? I would place a bet that it is less than 10%.

Perhaps anyone reading this thread that uses RAID 5 currently could post to say whether they have a 'hot spare' or a drive sitting ready to replace a failed drive, or perhaps whether they would rely on Overclockers excellant next day delivery service?
 
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